work with us

technology

We’re pioneers. We’ve become thought leaders and educators in some of the key technologies online.

We’ve also created our own. And we’re not stopping there.

React

Our core competency is React, a JavaScript framework for building rich, dynanamic web applications which was created and open sourced by Facebook in 2013. We have been writing production React code since January 2014, and we've built one of the larger, more complex React applications in existence: Dashcube. We've also built smaller, more focused React applications, such as a photo review and purchasing application which interfaces with a Ruby on Rails backend.

Rails

We use Ruby on Rails for more traditional web applications. We built our own product, Leanpub, using Rails. We've also done Rails development for multiple clients since 2008, either with normal HTML user interfaces or with Flex user interfaces (when the Flash platform was a viable choice for rich internet applications).

We created Markua to help authors write books on Leanpub. Markua is a plain text format based on Markdown and designed for the writing of books and documents. At Leanpub, we generate PDF, EPUB, MOBI and HTML ebooks based on Markua. Markua is intended to be extremely simple and powerful. We want Markua to be the best way in the world to write everything from a short story or a novel to a computer programming book, user manual or doctoral thesis. We're currently making Markua an open specification.

our team

We're based in Victoria, BC, Canada. Victoria is the home of UVic, one of the best Computer Science schools in Canada. UVic is one of our secret weapons: we love recruiting directly out of its computer science program, to get amazingly talented developers before they're lost to the bay area forever. Victoria is a great place to live, and Ruboss offers an amazing company culture. Since we are also building our own startup (Leanpub), we can hire amazing, startup-level people that normal consultancies would have great difficulty recruiting.

projects

We love building startups and products. We work in close collaboration with our customers. We see software development as a deep, meaningful collaboration between us and our customers. We prefer to work with customers in either the Pacific Time or Eastern Time zones, so that one of us is on the same time zone as you. We work using a lean approach called kanban, which is similar to scrum but in which work is pulled by developers based on your immediate priorities. This way, we can rapidly respond to changing business requirements, and be trusted partners in building your successful startup or product.

Leanpub

Leanpub is our own startup. Authors and publishers use Leanpub to publish amazing in-progress and completed books. So far, we've paid over $2 million in royalties to our authors, about $1 million in the past year. Leanpub books are written using a lightweight process called Lean Publishing, in which authors or publishers can publish a new version of their book with one click. Because of this, books can be published in-progress, which is great for all kinds of books, from computer programming books (Leanpub's specialty) to business books to serial fiction.

dashcube

Dashcube helps teams communicate in context, to stay current without constant meetings and email. Dashcube is the only collaboration tool that gives planning and communicating equal status. This means you can structure your tasks and communicate about them in the same place, at the same time, without any extra effort.

Years ago, we helped build Artona's Flex application for digital photo review and purchase, and now we're helping them bring it into 2015 by rewriting it in React so that it works seamlessly on mobile and on tablets.